Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), English poet, political thinker, and feminist.

Barrett Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, to a prosperous family whose wealth derived from Jamaican slave plantations. Educated at home in Hope End, Herefordshire, she was deeply interested in classical poetry and aesthetic theory. Her earliest poems, The Battle of Marathon (1820), an epic in the style of Alexander Pope, and An Essay on Mind and Other Poems (1826), were privately published by her father, Edward Moulton Barrett. Her translation of Prometheus Bound, by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, appeared in 1833 and was highly regarded, though she later repudiated it as cold and dull and wrote a new version, published in 1850. In The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), she expressed Christian sentiments within the framework of classical Greek tragedy. Barrett Browning was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment, her physical pain amplified by her grief at the drowning of her eldest brother in 1840. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a volume of poems with an American edition introduced by Edgar Allan Poe.

This volume included “Lady Geraldine's Courtship”, one of her first experiments in combining the structures of the poem and the novel. Narrated by the voice of a male poet, this dialogue between lovers considers the question of woman's status as the object of art. Its long lines combine the regularity of the ballad form with a modern rhetorical complexity:

These verses were so highly regarded that in 1850, when William Wordsworth died, Barrett Browning was suggested as his successor as Poet Laureate of England.

In 1845 the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth Barrett to praise her work. Interest in her relationship with Browning, to which Edward Barrett was bitterly opposed, has frequently eclipsed serious consideration of her poetic output. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at the age of 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. This sequence of 44 Petrarchan sonnets brings an archaic form of love poetry into a contemporary setting: the lovers of the sequence are recognizably Victorian, and their mutual desire is a matter of passionate equality:

Barrett Browning expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in the collections of poems Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860), which was considered as unreasonable and “unwomanly”. Her longest and most ambitious work is Aurora Leigh (1856), perhaps best described as a novel in blank verse. Primarily, it is the story of a female poet's artistic development in the face of her cousin's conviction that “[m]ere women, personal and passionate” cannot comprehend the “universal anguish” that, he argues, is the source of poetic profundity.

Barrett Browning fell ill and died at Casa Guidi, and was buried in Florence's Protestant Cemetery. Robert Browning prepared her Last Poems (1861) for publication. After her death, she was the subject of much romantic mythologizing, notably in Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930). The recent efforts of feminist critics have restored her reputation as a serious artist.